In the modern world, a person attempting to send a message to a recipient is faced with a plethora of communications choices. A sender typically has access to multiple addresses and contact numbers for each recipient in his or her address- or phonebook, such as the familiar email, home and/or office phone, fax, pager, mobile phone, or voice-enabled personal digital assistant (PDA) numbers. Many recipients will also have more than one email address, for example email; addresses for work, home, private, or mobile (Web-accessible) systems. Even when the recipient uses only a single type of message media/technology (such as the telephone), there can be different points of contact. Which number to call first or which email address to try first is up to the sender of the message.
If a sender initially attempts a voice call and does not reach the recipient on the first try, he or she typically leaves a message using a conventional message service. If the phone number connects to a system with voicemail features, the sender can readily leave a message there. If, however, there is no voicemail capability at the called number, the sender must leave a message with a human receptionist (if there is one) or try another number. Even if he or she leaves a message (whether live, and therefore subject to distortion or loss, or in a voicemail system), or if no voicemail is available, the sender may still desire contact with the recipient and will often times turn to email.
In a further complication, some conventional telephone answering systems also provide the choice of sending a page (either in all numeric or alphanumeric form) to the recipient. When the subject is especially urgent, callers may even call all of the phone numbers they have, as well as send email to all of the addresses in their phonebook. Moreover, some email systems, upon receipt of an email marked “urgent,” also send out a page to the recipient, using a “delivery fork.”
Even after the sender records their message, the sender still must wait for actual delivery to the recipient. This ultimate delivery requires an action by the recipient: he or she must activate or access the message service and its associated output device in order to see and/or hear the message. Typical message services used today with phone numbers include (for example) stand-alone answering machines and electronic voicemail systems. Email addresses themselves represent a messaging system, of course: the email server used by and client software installed on the recipient's computer. Pager numbers likewise represent a messaging system consisting of (at least in part) the paging call receiver, its associated radio network, and the recipient's pager device. As noted above, conventional output devices and their associated message services include, for example, email client software in an email message service, the telephone handset used to access a voicemail message service, and the pager device used to receive pages in a paging message service. Clearly, the message itself has little effect until the recipient both knows it has arrived at the output device and sees or hears it.
The recipient bears the burden of this messaging overload: he or she may find, in an especially urgent situation, voicemail messages in each of several systems, multiple email messages (which, thanks to the magic of email forwarding, may be duplicated amongst the recipient's several email addresses), and a repeatedly buzzing pager.
Numerous communications and messaging management systems that attempt to coordinate messaging a recipient (i.e., the sending of messages to a recipient user) are known in the art. For example the Wildfire system, disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,652,789; 6,047,053 (a continuation of the patent application that matured into the '789 patent); and U.S. Pat. No. 6,021,181, all issued to Miner et al. and incorporated herein by reference in their entireties, is a system for routing incoming calls in a telephonic system using an electronic assistant. The Wildfire system, however, does not disclose managing the delivery of multiple, redundant messages from a single sender left for a recipient user. Instead, Wildfire manages the sender's actions so that only a single message is recorded for later delivery.
Another conventional approach to intelligently routing messages is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,618,710 to Zondervan et al., incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Zondervan et al. discloses an apparatus and method for intelligently routing electronic messages to computers and pagers. The method monitors whether a recipient user appears to be at a computer workstation and, if so, it forwards the electronic messages to the workstation. If, however, no user activity is detected at the designated workstation, the electronic message is instead forwarded to the recipient user's pager. Zondervan et al. does not generate multiple copies of a message; rather, it only decides where to route a single message.
Some message-routing systems rely on so-called “presence” systems to route messages based on directory information on where a user “is” (in terms of the user's most-current address or phone/pager number) at a particular time. These systems attempt to manage call completion by collecting and publishing a subscriber's current contact information and contact media, such as the subscriber's email addresses, phone (both fixed and land-line and mobile) numbers, and pager numbers. This contact information may also be associated with a schedule describing when the subscriber is available and via which media. Presence systems are described in, for example, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Requests for Comments (RFCs) 2778 and 2779, available at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2778.txt?number=2778 and http://www.ietf.org/rfc/-rfc2779.txt?number=2779 (respectively) and incorporated herein by reference in their entireties. Presence systems typically provide addressing coordination that enables one user (the sender) of the present system to locate and contact call another user (the recipient) more efficiently.
Some presence systems depend on the recipient to supply availability data to the system on the recipient's preferred and/or available messaging media, i.e., the phone or pager numbers and email addresses at which the recipient will be available for a defined period of time. These systems may be referred to as “push” systems because they require the recipient to “push” his or her availability/presence information to the presence server. Conventional examples of the systems are the Lotus® Sametime® (a.k.a. IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing) and Jabber® products. Lotus and Sametime are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation of Armonk, N.Y. Jabber is a registered trademark of Jabber, Inc. of Denver, Colo.
Presence systems do not, however, manage messages left by a sender in the various (and separate) messaging services typically attached to or associated with a recipient's various addresses and/or phone numbers.
The use of the Internet and other networks to carry telephony and other signals and thus provide message services is also known. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is one area of effort in the IETF directed at a text-based protocol, similar to HTTP and SMTP, for initiating interactive communications services between users. Such sessions may include voice, video, chat, interactive games, and virtual reality applications. The current SIP effort involves creation of a draft standard (RFC 2543, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety) and to specify and develop proposed extensions to the protocol. A further related effort, described in IETF Internet Draft “draft-ietf-iptel-cpl-09.txt” (available at http://www.IETF.org/Internet-drafts/ and also incorporated herein by reference in its entirety), is directed at a Call Processing Language that can be used to describe and control Internet telephony services. This language is designed to be implementable on either network servers or user agent servers. Neither of these technologies deals with managing message delivery across multiple messaging media with multiple message copies.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,948,061 (to Merriman et al.) describes a means of targeting the delivery of advertisements on the Internet by ensuring that an advertisement displayed in a web page is well-matched to a user. One aspect of the disclosed targeting is making sure that it is not repetitive. However, such advertisement messages (ads) are not actually targeted at a single person but rather at a class of persons, and the ad display system works by deferring the selection of the ad delivered until it is needed to be displayed. The ad display system keeps an inventory of ads on a server and chooses a single ad for a viewer on demand. Such a system is not useful when advertising messages are too large to deliver promptly on demand, as reflected in the fact that ad servers have to place tight restrictions on how large an ad can be. In addition, such a system depends on the viewer “pulling” the ad, and is not workable for message systems that “push” a notification to the recipient after a message is received.